Another shorty blog post.
I ran into an issue on a customer site where we needed to blow away a provisioned Search Service Application, create a new one and recrawl the environment. Although when we did, the SharePoint search crawler couldn’t access the sites it was trying to index. I did the normal checks to make sure I could log into the site using the search crawl service account and found that I could. Looked into the rest of the usual suspects and couldn’t weed out the issue.
Here is the error I was getting in the ULS log:
12/08/2011 09:41:44.97 mssearch.exe (0x2878) 0x24C4 SharePoint Server Search Gatherer cd11 Warning The start address http://your.domain.here.com cannot be crawled. Context: Application ‘SearchServiceApplication’ Catalog ‘Site_Content_Database’ Details: Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository verify that the account you are using has “Full Read” permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. (0x80041205)
I recalled playing around with loopback check when I was trying to get a performance monitor collection up and running. Turns out this was the culprit. So if you get this error make sure you turn LoopBack check OFF (1 = disabled where 0=disabled is off). If you need more info on managing the “DisableLoopBackCheck”.
Check it out here. Enjoy.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926642/en-us